When Chaplin played father

Charlie Chaplin, who died 25 years ago, was notorious as a serial seducer of teenage girls. His son and granddaughter reveal that the 'tyrannical' actor was also a devoted family man. David Thomas reports

"My father was someone who knew what he wanted," Eugene Chaplin says. "People say, 'Oh, he was a tyrant, he was so difficult.' I agree. But the fine line is that if you know what you want and it's a success, you're a genius. And if it's a flop, you're a tyrant."

Charlie Chaplin, one of the first and biggest screen idols, died 25 years ago, on Christmas Day 1977. To commemorate this anniversary Eugene is making a film about his father, and has agreed to a rare interview.

We meet in the minimally chic Metropolitan Hotel on Park Lane in London, together with his daughter Kiera, who narrates the film. Eugene looks how his father might have if he had been inflated with a footpump - much wider of girth but with the same hooded eyes and slightly protuberant mouth. Kiera, too, has those inimitable Chaplin features, but is model-thin.

"Dad was very strict," remembers Eugene, 50, speaking with a Swiss accent and so quietly you sometimes have to strain to hear him. "Because his own background had been so difficult, he hated the idea that we would miss out on education. He thought we were so lucky to have that opportunity. But personally, I hated school. He would always get very frustrated with me. He'd say, 'I'd accept it if you couldn't do your work because you were stupid. But you're not even trying!'

"He always said, 'I don't care whether you want to be a brain surgeon or just someone sweeping the streets. But whatever you do, do it well. Don't do it half-heartedly.' "

Related Articles

Eugene only saw his father "blow his top" once. "Most of the time, he was someone who kept it all in himself and let it brew. If I had a bad school report, it would take him days to get over it. Every time I saw him he'd remind me: 'That report is still bothering me.' "

Eugene's film, entitled My Tribute, includes previously unseen footage from the family home in Corsier-sur-Vevey in Switzerland, a stunning property which the world's billionaires would fight over if it ever came on the market, and where the Chaplins settled in 1952.

"It's a beautiful old country house, very warm and cosy," says Eugene, who moved back there with his wife, Bernadette, on his mother's death in 1991. "It stands on 13 acres of land, just above Lake Geneva, so you can see the lake from the front of the house, and the Alps are right behind you. I remember playing football with Dad on the front lawn. He'd kick the ball so far, I'd have to run miles to get it."

Although Kiera, a 20-year-old model and actress, never met her grandfather, she remembers growing up with her grandmother. "She was all alone in a big house," she says, early in our meeting.

Her English accent sounds more like a fluently learned second language than a native tongue. "It was like a castle - and she'd invite me over all the time and spoil me," she adds. For the rest of the interview Kiera sits beside her father, looking glamorous but saying nothing.

Aside from his film career, Chaplin is remembered as a party animal, serial seducer of under-age girls and troubled monomaniac. Yet the documentary footage assembled by Eugene recasts him as family man, a relaxed father playing with his children and performing clownishly for the camera.

'My father and his older brother Sydney were very funny together," says Eugene. "They loved to do magic tricks in front of me. One of them would catch my attention by saying, 'Look, here's a handkerchief and I'm going to hide it under my hand.' Meanwhile, the other one would be behind me, hiding another handkerchief in the corner. They'd open up the hand and say, 'Look, it's not there any more!' Then they'd go to the back of the room and, 'Ta-daaa!' "

Whereas Eugene and his seven siblings were born into a world of limitless affluence - by the late 1920s, the Chaplin fortune was estimated at £3.3 million, the equivalent of £61.4 million today - Charlie was the son of impoverished entertainers in south London. In 1890, when Charlie was aged just one, his father left the family home, and later he and Sydney, as children, were forced to earn their own living on the stage.

According to Eugene, his father rarely spoke of his earliest days. Nor did he talk about the three wives and countless affairs that preceded his marriage to their mother, Oona O'Neill.

"I don't know if his silence was out of respect for my mother," says Eugene. "But the only time it was ever mentioned was when we saw Modern Times, with Paulette Goddard, and Mum said, 'Oh yes, that's your dad's ex-wife.' "

Goddard was the third of Chaplin's four wives and, like the two preceding her, was a teenager when she married him. Chaplin, however, was not just interested in young girls. Movie stars, heiresses and other men's lovers figured in his numerous affairs as well, the most notorious being Marion Davies, the mistress of the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. In 1924, according to Hollywood legend, Hearst mistakenly shot Thomas Ince, a movie producer, at a party aboard his yacht, when he had in fact been aiming for Chaplin.

Does Eugene consider himself dull in comparison? "My character definitely comes from my mother," he smiles. "She was calm and understanding. My father was very turbulent and very ambitious. But he always knew how to turn on his charm."

Eugene seems to have been charmed more than most. When I ask about his father's reputation for being troublesome, even malevolent, Eugene is quick to jump to his defence. "In the early days, he was a typical actor. When he went to a party, he was the centre of attraction. That could cause a lot of mischief. People don't realise that the stars who made Hollywood at that time all started very, very young. At that age you do crazy things."

Chaplin had arrived in America in 1912, aged 23. By the mid-1920s he not only wrote, directed, starred in and distributed his own films; he also owned the copyright to them. No other film star has ever had such control over his own work, and it made Chaplin and his family very rich. It also made him very unpopular.

In 1943, Chaplin was accused of fathering the child of a small-time actress called Joan Barry. Blood tests proved that he could not have been the father, yet a Californian court still ruled that he should pay for the child's upbringing. By 1952, when he was denied a re-entry visa to America on the grounds that he was a suspected communist, Chaplin had had enough.

"He was treated really badly," Eugene says. "Hoover and the FBI were trying to control Hollywood, and my father wouldn't have it. They wanted to prove that he was a communist and they couldn't."

By then Chaplin's movie-making career was all but over: in the last three decades of his life he made only four films, all of which were failures at the box office. Yet, according to Eugene, the happiest time of his life was about to begin. For in 1943, in the midst of the Joan Barry furore, Chaplin, then 54, married Oona O'Neill, the 18-year-old daughter of Eugene O'Neill. The playwright was so furious he promptly disinherited his daughter.

As Eugene tells me, "People said, 'Oh she's after the money,' or, 'He's perverting young girls.' But they stayed together for the rest of their lives. He'd found the love of his life."

Not all of Charlie and Oona's eight children have waxed so nostalgic. Eugene's older sister Jane, for example, once claimed her parents' love was so intense that, "I felt as if I was intruding on their intimacy." Eugene, loyally, chooses a different interpretation.

"It was comforting because they were very affectionate to each other. Whenever they were together they held hands. My father was a busy man and I'm still amazed by the amount of time he had for us."

Family life operated to a strict timetable, which began when Charlie, immaculately dressed in jacket and tie, had breakfast with Oona, away from the children. After that, says Eugene, "He would work from 9am till midday. He wrote his autobiography, and film scripts. He also discovered that he could compose music, so he did a lot of that as well.

"He would have lunch with my mother and then from 5pm, when we'd got back from school, he'd be with us. At 6pm, he'd have a drink, usually a whisky, or a Pernod. We'd all eat together at about 6.45 and then we'd go to bed."

The house was often filled with such famous friends as Yul Brynner, James Mason, Noel Coward and Truman Capote.

"Truman always dressed so flamboyantly. And he was the most outrageous visitor in other ways," Eugene recalls. Capote's frequent ambition, he continues, was to wind up Chaplin. "He once passed by the house to say hello and said, 'Oh Charlie, I just wrote a book about the death penalty and I went to two executions.'

My father started growling at him, because he hated the death penalty, but Truman, who was dressed from head to toe in red, just kept chattering away, saying things like, 'Oh, they throw poison capsules into the chamber and the guy dies instantly. He doesn't have time to suffer,' as if it was the most normal thing in the world."

The Chaplins would spend part of the winter at their chalet in the ski resort of Crans-Montana, and Easter in Ireland. "When we went to Ireland, we would stay at a really nice family hotel in Waterville," remembers Eugene. "I was the fishing type, so I'd spend the whole day salmon-fishing. My father loved it, too. A fisherman would come with us to row the boat and we'd go out on the lakes. There were little islands where we'd stop for lunch and have picnics. If we'd caught a small trout, we'd cook that and eat it.

"The only luxurious holidays we had were in London, where we'd stay at the Savoy. We always had an amazing room, facing the Thames. Dad loved getting up first thing in the morning and going for a walk along the Embankment."

Chaplin's comedy depended for much of its humour on his athleticism and agility, and he remained remarkably fit. "Up to the age of 85 he was in really good health," says Eugene. "He never took any special exercise. He was just naturally like that. But then his health went down very quickly. He had several strokes, which suddenly caught up with him, physically. At the end of his life, he couldn't walk properly and it was another stroke that killed him."

Oona lived on for another 14 years, dying in 1991 at the age of 66. "When my father died there was a huge emptiness in her life," says Eugene. "She fought on very well. She really tried, but as time went on that emptiness got on top of her. There were loads of people who came up to the house and proposed to her. But she turned them all down."

Eugene himself has never tried to compete with his father's stardom. "When I was at school and doing stage plays, I realised that acting is a very difficult thing. Either you have the talent or you don't, and I haven't."

A stop-start career has seen him work as a stage-manager, a recording studio engineer (his clients included the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and Queen) and an antiques dealer. He has also attempted, unsuccessfully, to set up a theme-park dedicated to his father.

I finish our conversation, morbidly perhaps, by asking him about the day his father died. Eugene sighs. "It was horrible," he says, his speech becoming even softer. "He'd been sick for a couple of weeks. He'd had a stroke and he was sleeping most of the time. We all knew what the end would be, but waiting for it was like a bad dream.

"The media had rented all the houses next door, to get pictures when it finally happened. There were people waiting round the gates. When the grown-ups refused to give them any information, they even started asking Christopher, my younger brother, who was just 15.

"My father finally slipped away on Christmas Day. For a while afterwards, I had weird, confusing dreams. I'd wake up and I wouldn't know what was dream and what was reality . . ."

Suddenly Eugene gives a toothy Chaplin grin. "The beauty of my father's story was that he did really well and made a lot of money. And then, after all his years of hard work, he found the woman of his dreams, settled in a beautiful home and became totally relaxed and felt happy. In my opinion, that's a fantastic model for a life."